Risperdal. Risperdal. Photo: Housed via Wikimedia Commons

The judge who oversaw the first punitive damages trial in the Risperdal litigation has decided to slash the award to $6.8 million after a Philadelphia jury handed up a record-busting $8 billion verdict against Janssen Pharmaceuticals last fall.

On Friday, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Kenneth Powell granted the post-trial remittitur motion that Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, had filed in the case Murray v. Janssen Pharmaceuticals. According to the docket, Janssen's post-trial motions were denied in all other respects.

Although Powell's two-sentence order did not outline his reasoning for drastically cutting the $8 billion jury award, the decision brings the punitive damages award to 10 times the $680,000 compensatory award for plaintiff Nicholas Murray.

Murray's attorney, Thomas Kline of Kline & Specter, said he believed that, "when the merits are reviewed that the $8 billion will be reinstated."

"The ruling is wrong and will be appealed. It wipes out a valid award of a jury which met all of the parameters under the decisional law and constitutional guardrails. The remitted verdict provides essentially no punishment for the worst of the worst of corporate misconduct," he said in an emailed statement. "Further, this ruling defeats the purpose of punitive damages, which is to punish and deter. It incentivizes bad behavior and undermines the right to trial by jury."

In an emailed statement, Janssen said that, although the court "appropriately reduced the excessive punitive damages award, we will continue to move ahead with an appeal of this verdict."

"The company was precluded from presenting a meaningful defense due to the court's exclusion of key evidence," spokesman Andrew Wheatley said. "As a result, vital evidence as to how the label for Risperdal clearly and appropriately outlined the benefits and risks associated with the medicine was not presented to the jury for their consideration as they deliberated on the case."

Drinker Biddle & Reath attorney David Abernethy filed the post-trial motions for Janssen. New York attorney John Winter of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and Ethel Johnson of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, who is from Texas, tried the case for J&J.

The jury that oversaw the nearly month-long punitive damages trial ruled 10-2 on Oct. 8 to slam Janssen Pharmaceuticals with the multibillion-dollar verdict. The award was solely for punitive damages after the case initially came to a $1.75 million verdict by a separate jury, which was later reduced to $680,000.

A review of The Legal's archives showed the $8 billion award was the largest verdict since at least 1994, when The Legal began tracking each year's largest verdict and settlement. The only higher award was part of a settlement hammered out in 2000, when Pennsylvania received $11.3 billion as its share of the nationwide $206 billion settlement to end tobacco litigation.

The verdict caught attention and headlines from across the country, but several attorneys told The Legal soon after the award came down that 25-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case law all but ensured the award would be reduced on appeal.

"There's not a hard-and-fast ratio to punitives, but the Supreme Court made clear it should have a rational relationship," defense attorney James Heller of Cozen O'Connor said. "Most courts look to three to four times."

Although, after the reduction, the punitive damages award still amounts to 10 times the compensatory award, what remains is less than one one-thousandth of what the jury initially awarded for punitive damages.

In the wake of the verdict, Richard Jurewicz of Galfand Berger, who represents plaintiffs in products liability cases, likened the litigation to a Roundup case that ended with a $2 billion punitive damages award, which was later reduced to $86 million. The California judge overseeing that case, which was against Monsanto, determined that the ratio between the $55 million compensatory award and the $2 billion punitive damages verdict was excessive.

The judge cited the 1996 Supreme Court case BMW of North America v. Gore, which said that when courts are trying to determine if a punitive damages award is "grossly excessive" courts should look to the degree to which a defendant's conduct is reprehensible, the comparison to other punitive damages awards and the ratio with the compensatory damages.

Powell's ruling clears the way for the appeal to move on into the state Superior Court.

According to court records, there are more than 7,000 Risperdal cases on the docket in Philadelphia.